New Xenaland
	Xena and Hercules Other Locations

This page lists a few lesser-used locations outside the main areas, or that we don't have separate a page for. Basically, anything not covered in one of the other pages may possibly be found here.
 

Auckland Domain

Skylines can be useful! The first shot in the scene before the camera pans down Note the pointy-roofed building top left	Far more people than I've ever seen here in reality
The actual spot, looking downslope Note the building on the skyline, centre	This is more like the usual crowd

Just for completeness - the truck-in-the-mall sequence, where Hel and Sarge confronted the very same cop who arrested Gabrielle in Clones, was in the mall at the 'Manukau Supa-Centa' between Cavendish Drive and Ronwood Avenue, just west of Manukau City Centre. That was easy - Bevis spotted a 'Harvey Norman' sign on a shopfront and it was just a matter of looking in the phone book.

Savage Memorial

A couple of miles further on, overlooking Tamaki Drive and giving good views over the islands of the Hauraki Gulf, is the Savage Memorial, a formal garden and pond fronting a mausoleum and obelisk dedicated to Michael Joseph Savage, the first Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand. This has only been used in one episode, the Hercules episode Wedding of Alcmene, but it's unmistakeable. We hope the ghost of Michael Joseph Savage wasn't offended by the cinematic goings-on around his monument.

Green Bay clifftop

For decades I'd been wondering where the clifftop scene in The Furies was, without ever holding out much hope of finding it (a cliff with pine trees on top? - hundreds of possibilities). Then, recently (September 2018) it occurred to me that a spot I've walked past several times recently might be it. And it was!

The yellow spots mark the locations

Between Green Bay beach and Taunton Terrace, on the north shore of the Manukau Harbour, is a small clifftop park full of pine trees. Overlooking the beach is a small headland, with 80 feet high cliffs, which is where Iolaus rescued Leandra in Love Takes a Holiday. Careful examination shows the whole scene was shot here (no green screen). Erosion at the top of the cliff has left a cluster of exposed pine roots, cleverly used with the right camera angles; the actors were clutching the roots at the top of the slope, the stunt doubles were genuinely dangling off roots over the sheer drop.

Iolaus chases the evil Iagos	and Leandra	to the cliff edge
The scene is	exactly the same	today
Dangling over the sheer drop	(cut to the leads)	scrambling over the roots to safety
The cliff is unchanged today	Exposed roots in the slope above the cliff edge	Green Bay beach is just below

A hundred yards further along, and a little higher up the cliff, is the scene where Xena confronted Ares in The Furies. This is just beside the official footpath which has since acquired an official 'safety' rail.

Ares and Xena	on the cliff edge	130 feet above the beach
Safety rail installed since	Looking up past the tree roots	Looking down on the camera position for the shot at left

The first shot above exceeded the contrast range of my camera; either dark foreground or faded-out horizon. The extraordinary depth in the view achieved by Renpics must have needed powerful foreground lighting.

Xena and Ares are standing a couple of feet from the edge of a 130 foot sheer drop. The third view is the actual view down the cliff at this point. To get the shot looking diagonally up at the actors, the cameraman must have scrambled down three or four feet to a little natural platform perched above a tree overhanging the drop. Very, very carefully.

Murphys Bush

At Flat Bush, on the edge of the urban area south-east of Auckland, is Murphys Bush, a quarter-mile strip of native forest which escaped the attentions of farmers. Under the mature trees, thousands of young nikau palms are growing up, and the resulting absence of undergrowth below them makes them easy to walk through (in a sense, the nikau palms are the undergrowth).
Being right beside Murphys Road, it would have been convenient for access, and the ease of walking or running through the nikau palms would have been ideal for filming. Now, there is a lot of traffic noise from the road, but it was a lot less busy in those days.

This reserve was used for many episodes of Hercules, right from the very beginning (as discussed by Kevin Sorbo and Wayne Rose in the commentary to Encounter). Most probably, it would have been used quite frequently in Xena episodes too.

Obviously, the usual method of verifying locations - pick a distinctive isolated tree silhouette or rock face in the episode and match it visually with the original - is going to be extremely difficult here. But it's probably fair to assume that, if you walk through the bush from the car park (at the northern end) to the southern end and back, you will have walked 'through' many scenes from Herc and Xena.

From Hercules and the Amazon Women,	nikau palm undergrowth	and a clearing
Murphys Bush...	thousands of nikau palms	and one of several small clearings

Hunua Falls

Further on, 15 miles south-east of Auckland in the Hunua Ranges lies Hunua Falls, a waterfall on the Wairoa River. This featured in a number of episodes - for details see the new 'Waterfalls' page.

Drury Quarry

According to the commentary for Encounter, RenPics made extensive use of the area above a quarry at Drury. This has some small coppices and bordering grass areas, and can be seen in Encounter (where it matches well with the woodland of Murphys Bush in the same episode). At one side the ground drops away (with the quarry presumably invisible below the edge) to leave a vista of distant countryside through the gaps in the trees. Kevin Sorbo notes that the huge scattered rocks are real.

This is almost certainly the huge quarry on the edge of the scarp at Ramarama, just southeast of Drury. (So far as we know the quarry itself is never seen on the show, and should not be confused with the 'quarry' sets at Sturges Road or Lion Park. A real quarry was used in early Herc episodes such as Lost Kingdom and Gladiator, but is more likely to have been the partly-disused quarry on the Te Henga Road to Bethells).

Some of the location may have been quarried away by now, and it is all in private property, so this location is mentioned just for completeness.

A series of scans of the location from the episode Encounter are shown below.

A number of scenes in other episodes come to mind, which may have been shot here, but only some careful comparison of the backgrounds would confirm this.

The fight between Herc and Xena in The Gauntlet was probably shot here (unless there's another location that looks remarkably like this one):

Fairly certain are the first few 'outdoor' scenes in Maternal Instincts...

... and, more speculatively, the first appearance of Morrigan in Resurrection.

South Island

The South Island has never been used for filming an episode, but we think that some time, very early in the series, PacRen must have taken Kevin Sorbo and Lucy plus a camera crew down to South Island for a couple of days and had them run past the camera to create some stock footage, which they've used at intervals as continuity shots ever since.

Mitre Peak on Milford Sound also crops up in the background in several episodes, such as Past Imperfect.

A South Island mountain range is the very first scene in Sins of the Past	Aidan's house enjoys a nice view of Mitre Peak

Waterfalls

There were three things which were a source of niggling discontent to us as location hunters. One was the location of The Debt, one was lakes, and the biggest one was waterfalls. Well, The Debt we've found (see the Central Plateau page), the lakes have turned out to be mostly the remarkably ubiquitous lake at Sturges Road with an assist from Lake Okaihau - but the waterfalls remained to plague us. Somehow Pacific Renaissance's scouts found, within easy distance of Auckland, a number of waterfalls that we just couldn't find!

Since then, though, hunting waterfalls for their own sake has turned up quite a number of the waterfalls featured, enough to justify their own page here.

(For more waterfalls, not necessarily associated with Herc or Xena, there's a page here.)



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